We recently witnessed our nation’s single most watched annual sporting event, the Super Bowl. Regardless of whether your team won or not, or whether you are a casual fan or not a fan at all, the Super Bowl brings together people across social, economic and racial groups in an amazing way.
This field of blended learning is emerging so fast, it is often difficult to truly understand what its trajectory will actually look like or where it will end. At Matchbook Learning we have a belief that blended learning is and will continue to be a superior form of teaching and learning when compared to its purely online counterpart, particularly as it relates to K-12 public education.
What does this have to do with the Super Bowl?
Larry Summers, former Harvard University President and President Obama Economic Advisor in a recent interview compared the impact of online learning in higher education to football:
“It's important to remember that we're not so good at understanding the subtleties of environments that make them attractive to people. Look at football for example. One way to watch a game is to sit on a cold bench with no good food and bad bathrooms; the other is in your own living room, with replay, and food you like at your convenience. And then ask yourself- which would you guess people pay for? Which do people cheer for? You'd get it wrong. There are aspects of bringing people together in groups that we can't quite understand and judge. The working out of this will depend a lot on formulas for making it attractive and collaborative. And as the football example suggests, it won't be immediately obvious what those models are."
In football, there’s something intangible about being at the game live that despite its obvious limitations (cost, sight visibility, food quality, restroom access and sitting next to complete screaming strangers to name a few) that Summers refers to continues to attract people. Advances in home viewership technology (plasma screen televisions in 1080p HD that rival small movie theater screens in size and quality) have not diminished the appeal at being at the game live. I didn’t notice any empty seats at the Super Bowl.
However, exponentially more people will watch and experience the Super Bowl at home than could ever be done in a live stadium. The large on-line and at-home virtual audiences drive the spectacular reach, mystique and pageantry of the game (hilarious commercials, half-time concert aka show, and not to mention the excited nervousness and tension of the players and coaches alike). A game not played in front of fans would lack so much in appeal just as a game not televised would not reach the same pinnacle that is the Super Bowl.
You can see the full interview that included Larry Summers and other brilliant minds such as Bill Gates, Peter Theil, a partner at Founder's Fund, Rafael Reif, president of MIT, Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, Daphne Koller, CEO of Coursera, and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has taken a number of Stanford physics classes through Udacity.
